The Crossroads, and What Is Not Described Here

The crossroads is not incidental scenery. In the Bantu Kongo and Angola ritual geography carried to Brazil by enslaved Central Africans, the point where paths cross is where the world of the living meets the world of the dead, and it is therefore where a transaction between them can be conducted. Quimbanda's use of thresholds, the crossroads and the cemetery gate above all, descends from that inheritance, reworked in Brazil alongside Kardecist spiritism and Yoruba derived elements as Quimbanda separated from Umbanda in the early twentieth century.

Diana Brown's study of Umbanda in urban Brazil and Lorand Matory's work on Afro Brazilian religion set out that formation and the contested relations between the traditions, in which Exu was demonised by some parties and claimed by others.

There is a second layer to this practice and the atlas does not describe it. The obligations sworn at initiation, the ritual materials and the words that bind a Tata or a Mae de Quimbanda to a particular spirit are closed, held within houses, and disclosed to initiates. Published ethnography describes the general shape and social function of the tradition without treating any one house's formulas as universal, and the atlas holds the same line. Naming a restriction is part of describing a religion accurately; working around it would not be.